Magnitude Tuning™ - Part Two
Magnitude Tuning™ - Part Two
How I tamed my digital hygiene routines
A few days ago, I introduced you to magnitude tuning™️. To round off this introduction, I want to give you detailed and raw examples of my personal life. Magnitude tuning is not limited to what I am to show you. But I wanted to pick the most vivid and tangible examples from my personal life.
In particular, we will look at...
how I tamed my digital hygiene routines (weekly, monthly, quarterly reviews)
how I found my personal goal setting cadence (weekly, quarterly, yearly goals)
+ maybe more...
Let's look at the most vivid magnitude tuning example there is: weekly reviews.
A weekly review usually contains some steps to clear inboxes. The weekly cadence is a good fit for most since it doesn't allow for too much stuff to accumulate while still being regular enough to not let things fall through the cracks.
Of course, everyone is different. Some may need reviews only every two weeks, some twice a week, and some irregularly. And some may want to use the power of this mighty ritual for more than just clearing inboxes. I was one of them…
That’s why, at one point, I had a weekly review that looked like this:
It all started as a short & simple checklist. But over time, it morphed into a quite long procedure. Next to clearing inboxes, my review included steps like planning the week ahead, connecting to a longer-term vision, and maintaining quantified self-tracking, …. Even cleaning the office room was in there for some time.
The reason: I was at a quite divergent phase of getting my productivity systems up and running. I added everything I deemed interesting or randomly stumbled upon. I added stuff that worked for other people.
The downsides are obvious (at least to someone looking from the outside). This review took me around 90 minutes and a lot of energy. And a lot of it was in vain since I didn't really make use of it later on.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don't think that going through this was a bad thing.
I deem exploration to be a necessity before cutting things down to their essence and start exploiting.
And I'd also advise you to vary of people who tell you otherwise.
If someone refines their system over the years, it includes a high level of personalization. It’s often presented to you completely out of context. You don't know what other systems the person has in place. You don't know how many steps the author has internalized and doing additionally without being aware of it.
You can copy their system as a starting point. But you will almost certainly have to expand from that first before you can later remove all of the non-essential. So, while expansion is a highly probable occurrence, the question remains: how do you transition from convergence (putting more into your review) into divergence (removing things from your review)?
This is where magnitude tuning enters the game.
Once I applied it, things started to change. Over several months, my weekly review slowly became more concise and appropriate. This is how it looks today: